1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to information transmitting apparatuses, and more particularly, to an information transmitting apparatus which can transmit the same information to a plurality of receiving apparatuses at any time. Such type of transmission will be referred to as "broadcast transmission" hereinafter.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a conventional broadcast transmitting apparatus, data from a transmitter or a data generating portion are once stored in a storage portion and, after the storage operation is completed, those stored data are sequentially transmitted to a plurality of desired destinations, or receiver-sides. With such a broadcast transmitting apparatus, however, it takes superfluous time only to store data while occupying the whole apparatus, and this results in a low efficiency of the apparatus.
In order to improve this kind of disadvantage, a storage-type broadcast transmitting apparatus which does not occupy any extra time in storing data is disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication No. 60-8670. In broadcast transmission processing with this broadcast transmitting apparatus, read-out data are stored in a storage portion while at the same time being transmitted to a first receiver among a plurality of specified ones, and the data transmission to the subsequent receivers is effected by reading out the data thus stored in the storage portion. This means that the data storage operation and the transmitting operation are performed in parallel, saving the time for storage.
With conventional broadcast transmitting apparatuses as described above, however, all destinations, or receivers, have to be specified at the time of transmission processing. In other words, even when it becomes necessary to transmit to any additional destination the same information as is just being or was already transmitted, the transmission processing has to be repeated from the very beginning and this makes the use of such apparatuses inconvenient.